Orion Weiss | Arc I: Granados, Janáček, Scriabin

Featuring Granados’s Goyescas, Janáček’s In the Mists, and Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9

Watch the Album Trailer for Arc I

Acclaimed pianist Orion Weiss released his album, Arc I: Granados, Janáček, Scriabin in March 2022 on First Hand Records. Arc I is the inaugural album of an ambitious three-part series and features important works for solo piano from the frantic years of 1911-1913 – the precipice before World War I. The three musical stories on Arc I – Granados’ Goyescas, Janáček’s In the Mists, and Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9 ”Black Mass” – each struggle with the same impossible awareness of what was coming for the world, and in doing so, plunge further into modernity and despair.

Of his Arc album series, Orion Weiss explains, “The arc of this recital trilogy is inverted, like a rainbow’s reflection in water. Arc I’s first steps head downhill, beginning from hope and proceeding to despair. The bottom of the journey, Arc II, is Earth’s center, grief, loss, 

the lowest we can reach. The return trip, Arc III, is one of excitement and renewal, filled with the joy of rebirth and anticipation of a better future.”

“Our world has suffered chaos, death, and much ugly change,” Weiss reflects. “The foreboding we experienced in 2020 was probably similar to what the composers featured on Arc I felt in the countdown to World War I: a silence before the storm, a chilling drop in pressure, and vast uncertainty. For us and for them, the future became like a patch of absolute black, totally unknowable and threatening. The pain of our subsequent descent has surely been both personal and global.”

The first work on Arc I is Enrique Granados’ gothic piano suite Goyescas, Op. 11 (1911), a masterpiece of motivic development. Weiss explains the dark emotional plot as, “A man courts a woman (I. Los requiebros), they declare love for one another (II. Coloquio en la reja) but are separated (III. El fandango de candil). The two lovers are faced with sorrow (IV. Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor), and later, by his death (V. El Amor y la muerte – Balada). Motifs initially representing love, hope and innocence are gradually transformed to signify longing, fear and loss. Just before the end of the sixth piece (VI. Epilogo: Serenata del espectro), which is a macabre dance through grisly-comic flashbacks, the main love theme makes a final appearance, sounding almost unscathed, yet with one significant change: its last note is altered to rise instead of fall. The statement of love is thus changed to an existential question. Over the music’s next gesture comes the question’s answer: We are left on an empty stage, all the vibrant characters gone. Death is quietly triumphant.”

Leoš Janáček’s In the Mists (1912) consists of four short movements that are more like entries in a wild diary than character pieces. Weiss explains, “Its ideas grow organically and unpredictably, as if in conversation or thought, and the borders between accompaniment and melodic material disappear. Perhaps the most potent is Janáček’s emblem of death, the falling minor third. After its first appearance in the third piece, it makes a startling, terrifying return in the fourth, just before the coda. The remaining music shatters and the work ends with despair and without resolution, stuck in hopeless, fragmented repetition.”